Environmental Regulatory Competition: A Status Report and Some New Evident

Author

Abstract

Concerns about devolving environmental regulatory powers to lower levels of government permeate debates in the U.S. and Europe about the appropriate level of regulatory authority. In theory, given a long list of conditions, regulatory competition by local governments can be efficient in the same way that tax competition can be efficient: local welfare-maximizing governments set the same standards or taxes as would an omniscient welfare-maximizing central government. In practice, however, these conditions are improbable, especially in the case of environmental regulations, and local competition is potentially inefficient. In the past two years, evidence has begun to emerge regarding the empirical importance of these inefficiencies. In this paper, I describe this nascent literature, drawing parallels to the tax competition literature, suggest some avenues for empirical research, and present some new results.

More about this item

Statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:geo:guwopa:gueconwpa~02-02-07. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.